China's ancient monograph on rivers is called Water Mirror, and its authors have always had different opinions. It is said that it was written by Pu Xue of the State of Jin, that it was written by Sangqin in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and that it was written by Sangqin by Guo Pu. Chen Qiaoyi, a contemporary philosopher, thinks that even though Han wrote Water Mirror and has annotations on the Book of the State of Jin, both annotations and annotations have been lost. Li Daoyuan notes that this version of Water Mirror is another version, and the author is an anonymous person. There are different opinions about its publication date. All thought it was the early years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and Dai Zhen thought it was the Three Kingdoms.
The water mirror annotation is named after the water mirror annotation.
The annotation of water mirror takes the waterway recorded by water mirror as the key link. The Six Classics of Tang Dynasty notes that there are 137 waterways in the water mirror, and the tributary is added to 1252 in the Water Mirror Note. Today, Zhao Yongfu counted the water bodies in the book, including lakes, lakes, ponds, springs, canals, ponds and ancient blasphemies, and recorded 2,596 places, twice as many as the Six Classics of the Tang Dynasty.
Notes total 300,000 words. The geographical scope involved, in addition to basically taking the territory of the Western Han Dynasty as the writing object, also involved many foreign regions at that time, including India, Indo-China Peninsula and parts of the Korean Peninsula, covering an unprecedented area.
The recorded time ranged from the pre-Qin period to the contemporary Southern and Northern Dynasties, which lasted about 2000 years. It contains a wide range of geographical contents, including natural geography, human geography, mountains and rivers, historical evolution, customs and habits, character stories, fairy tales and so on. It's really an encyclopedia of geography in China in the 6th century. What is commendable is that such rich and colorful content is not a simple list of phenomena, but a systematic and comprehensive account. Professor Hou Renzhi summed it up most aptly: "He endowed geographical description with the depth of time and many historical events with the realism of concrete space." (Introduction to Selected Works of Water Mirror)
Notes on Water Mirror is a masterpiece of ancient geography in China, covering all aspects of natural geography and human geography. In terms of physical geography, there are more than 1000 rivers, including the main stream, tributaries, valley width, bed depth, seasonal variation of water quantity and water level, sediment concentration, ice age and undercurrent, waterfalls, rapids, beaches and lakes along the river, etc., which are widely collected and recorded in detail. There are more than 500 lakes and swamps, nearly 300 springs and wells and other groundwater, more than 30 undercurrents and more than 60 waterfalls. Various landforms are recorded in highlands, such as mountains, mountains, peaks, mountains, Sakamoto, hills, hills, obstacles, peaks, rocky mountains and plains, and in lowlands, such as Sichuan, Wild, Lying Wild, Pingchuan, Plain and Yuan Qi. There are nearly 2000 mountain hills, karst and other place names.
In terms of human geography, the records of some administrative divisions can often supplement the shortcomings of official geographical records. There are * * * 2,800 county-level cities and other cities, 180 ancient capitals. In addition, settlements smaller than cities include 10, including towns, towns, pavilions, towns, villages, markets, garrisons, docks, castles, etc., about 1000. These cities include some foreign cities, such as Polonaise City, Bahrain City, Wangshe New City, and Zhanpo Country City. And important military areas in Linyi, such as Sucheng and Guodu Electric Chongcheng, are recorded in detail. Traffic geography includes water transportation and land transportation, in which there are about 100 bridges and nearly 100 ferries. There are a lot of information about farmland water conservancy in Economic Geography, and the names of farmland water conservancy projects recorded are Poyang Lake, Dike, Pond, Weir, Yi, Li *, Tuo, Shuimen, etc. There are also a lot of data on land reclamation and farming system. Handicraft production includes mining, metallurgy, machinery, textiles, coins, food and so on. The recorded minerals include metallic minerals such as gold, silver, copper, iron, tin and mercury, nonmetallic minerals such as realgar, sulfur, salt, graphite, mica, timely, jade and stone, and energy minerals such as coal, oil and natural gas. In addition, there are military geography, population geography, ethnic geography and other information.
In addition to rich geographical content, there are many subject matter materials. For example, there are about 20,000 place names recorded in the book, of which more than 2,400 are explained. There are more than 30 ancient pagodas, 20 palaces 120, 260 tombs, 26 temples and many gardens at home and abroad. It can be seen that the book has certain reference value to history, archaeology, toponymy, water conservancy history, ethnology, religion, art and so on. These contents are not only amazing in quantity, but more importantly, the author uses literary and artistic techniques to describe them vividly, so it is still a classic of China classical literature and occupies a certain position in the history of literature. It is a collection of landscape prose, a collection of myths and legends, a guide map of scenic spots and historical sites, and an interview record of local conditions and customs in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. "Water Mirror Notes" is also excellent in language use. As far as waterfalls are concerned, the words it uses are: long, flood, suspended current, suspended water, suspended waves, suspended springs, suspended streams, suspended waves, ebbing waves, flying clear and so on. It's endless. Therefore, we say that Zhu is not only a scientific masterpiece, but also a literary and artistic treasure.
The value of such rich content is self-evident. As far as historical geography is concerned, it plays an endless role. Professor Hou Renzhi used it to repair ancient water conservancy projects in Beijing suburbs and studied the historical changes of Mu Us Desert. We can use it to study ancient waterway changes, lake annihilation, groundwater development, coastal changes, urban planning, climate change in historical periods and many other topics.
Zhu Dui's profound influence is inseparable from Li Daoyuan's serious attitude towards scholarship. In order to write this book, he collected a large number of documents, quoted 437 books, sorted out about 350 kinds of Han and Wei inscriptions, and collected many folk songs, proverbs, dialects, legends and stories. , and carefully analyzed and studied all the materials obtained, personally visited historical sites, traced back to the source, and adopted a scientific attitude of seeking truth from facts. This book is actually a summary of the ancient geography of China before the Northern Wei Dynasty. Many valuable materials in the book have long been lost, and many people can edit or revise some ancient books from them.
Of course, limited by the times and conditions at that time, such a great masterpiece inevitably has many mistakes. In Tongdian, Du You in Tang Dynasty clearly pointed out his "misunderstanding" about the source of the Yellow River. In addition, because it is impossible for him to conduct field investigations in remote areas and the south, there are many mistakes in this regard. Quotations in some places are not credible and so on. But these do not damage the value of the book.
The original "Water Mirror Zhu" has 40 volumes, and the early Song Dynasty lost 5 volumes. Later generations revised the remaining 35 volumes to 40 volumes. Due to repeated copying, the mistakes are very serious, and some chapters are even difficult to read. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, many scholars did a lot of research work on Zhu, and some of them corrected more than 500 errors and basically restored the original appearance. Some of them have done a lot of compilation work, and more have done collation and annotation. Yang Shoujing, a famous scholar in the late Qing Dynasty, and his disciple Xiong Zhongsheng wrote Notes on Water Classics all their lives, compiling Notes on Water Classics, comparing ancient and modern times, and overprinting them. Recently, Jiangsu Ancient Books Publishing House published Shuijing Annotation, which was proofread by Duan Xizhong and proofread by Chen Qiaoyi, providing convenience for the future research and utilization of Shuijing Annotation.